Paranoia XP – System Mastery 110

A madcap dystopia that has more accompanying memes per square centimeter than anything short of Dungeon and Dragons itself. Is Paranoia worth braving the swamp of people at the store endless parroting stuff about friend computer? Actually yeah, kind of!

Zap is kind of a sop to the people who actually liked the “bad” adventures for the previous editions and “Paranoia 5e”, which had things like High Programmers setting themselves up on robot-crewed pirate ships, the GM being told to stop playing to sing a song to the Muppet show theme, an automatic TPK if the players didn’t say “we stop the train” as it approaches the buffers, and a straight up fight with the Mortal Kombat characters at the end of an adventure.

Based on the adventures Straight seems to be trying to be dark political satire. One of the sample Straight-ish adventures was “the PCs are sent to guard an invisible stealth train, but there is no train, the scientist ran off with the money. But all the project directors and PCs superiors etc. have all told The Computer that there is totally a train there and if the PCs don’t find a way to play along, they’ll be accused of stealing it. And by the way this is based on some actual railway line from Mao’s China which didn’t exist but was officially the most productive one in the country.” The problem is that these adventures generally run badly and don’t leave the PCs with a whole lot to actually do or engage with.